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Jim Carroll

Music, Life and everything else

Two in a row: OTR wins Irish Blog Award again

Bloody hell, OTR has won another gong. For the second year in a row, this blog won the award for Best Blog from a Journalist at the Irish Blog Awards, which were held in Belfast on Saturday night. Nope, I …

Jim Carroll

jimcarroll

Mon, Mar 21, 2011, 08:23

Bloody hell, OTR has won another gong. For the second year in a row, this blog won the award for Best Blog from a Journalist at the Irish Blog Awards, which were held in Belfast on Saturday night. Nope, I wasn’t expecting that.

Big congrats to all the other winners, thanks to the various award sponsors (Bvisible sponsored the Best Blog from a Journalist category) and huge “well done” to the people behind the scenes, especially IBA commander-in-chief Damien Mulley.

I couldn’t be in Belfast on Saturday night because I’m currently in Texas, but I really wish I could have been there to hang out with the other bloggers but, most importantly, to give Mulley a big pat on the back. Since the dude started these awards, he has had to put up with an unusually large share of begrudgery from the usual suspects who never actually do things like this themselves. It’s further proof that it’s much easier to crib and sneer from the sidelines than stand in the middle of the pitch yourself.

Regardless, Mulley has kept on keeping on and the awards are a testimony to his fuck-you-I-won’t-do-what-you-tell-me mission statement. He has now decided to step down from running the Irish Blog Awards and I’m sure there are plenty who will fancy chancing their arm at the helm, but it won’t be the same. You need a mad, contrary, argumentive, driven loose cannon like Mulley to get something like this off the ground and keep it going. He’s now planning to spend his retirement in Leitrim working on solar-powered social media and SEO innovations.

The other thanks goes to the OTR readers. Every day, I stick up a post or two here on an extremely wide selection of topics (topics which have ranged from music and the music business to politics, pop culture, hurling and God-knows-what-else in the past year). Every day, you lot read these posts and then take the discussion in a myriad of different directions. It’s these conversations and occasionally heated debates which ensure that I still enjoy doing this blog as much as I did when it started almost four years ago. Once again, a huge thanks to all of you.